William Egan ColbyCaptain, United States ArmyDirector, Central Intelligence
Agency

From contemporary press reports:

William E. Colby (4 January 1920-28 April 1996),
intelligence officer, was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, the son of Elbridge
Colby, an army officer and educator, and Margaret Mary Egan Colby,
an ardent Catholic who guided her son in the path of that religion. William
Colby was also influenced by his father's liberal views and by the family's
peripatetic movements to locations as diverse as China and Vermont, where
he studied at Burlington High School. He attended Princeton University,
where he felt himself to be an outsider, educated as he had been at public
schools and presenting, at five feet, eight inches, topped by eyeglasses,
the appearance of a young man unlikely to win acceptance through athletic
prowess. He graduated with an A.B. in 1940.

In 1941 Colby joined the U.S. Army and in 1943
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The OSS trained him for special
missions, and he served behind enemy lines in France and Norway. In an
effort to prevent German troops from being redeployed through Norway to
be used against advancing Allied forces in Germany, he led the raid to
destroy the Tangen railroad bridge--a daring and spectacular success, though
the bridge was soon rebuilt.

In 1945 Colby married Barbara Heinzen; they
had four children. He obtained a law degree from Columbia University in
1947, the same year that Congress approved the formation of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA). After working for a short time in a law firm,
Colby in 1949 joined the new agency. He served in Stockholm (1951-1953)
and then in Rome (1953-1958), where he helped to arrange the secret subsidization
of political parties to prevent communist electoral victories. Most of
the recipients were centrist or slightly left of center, a political alignment
that proved effective in combating communism but that gave Colby the reputation
of having endorsed the "opening to the Left."

Colby was CIA station chief in Saigon from
1959 to 1962 and headed the agency's Far East division from 1962 to 1967.
Then from 1968 to 1971 he directed the Phoenix program in South Vietnam,
which sought to identify and eliminate communist activists (the Viet Cong)
at the village level. Colby felt that the program was superior to the use
of military force, which he believed was too blunt an instrument and alienated
the Vietnamese. Nevertheless, estimates of the number killed under Phoenix
range as high as 60,000 people. (Colby put the number at 20,587.) Phoenix
has also been defended on relativist grounds--the Viet Cong assassinated
nearly 40,000 of their enemies in the period from 1957 to 1972. But none
of these arguments could prevent the program from becoming a focal point
of the antiwar movement. Although Colby maintained that the deaths characteristically
arose in combat and not as a result of cold-blooded murder, critics of
Phoenix labeled it an assassination program and a crime against humanity.

After Phoenix, Colby rose within the CIA's
Washington bureaucracy, and on 4 September 1973 President Richard Nixon
appointed him director of the agency. During his tenure the press and Congress
turned on the CIA, accusing it of crimes and misdemeanors ranging from
assassination plots to espionage against Americans at home. When in 1975
both houses of Congress set up inquiries into the activities of the intelligence
community, Colby offered significant if limited cooperation. For example,
he handed over to the Senate committee chaired by Idaho Democrat Frank
Church details of the CIA's recent operations against the left-leaning
government in Chile. The agency's attempts to sabotage the Chilean economy
had contributed to the downfall of South America's oldest democracy and
to the installation of a vicious dictatorship. Colby's candor on such matters
shocked colleagues in the CIA, some of whom never forgave him for opening
up the activities of what was, after all, a secret agency. His only daughter,
Catherine, had died after a painful illness in April 1973, and colleagues
speculated that the tragedy unlocked what some regarded as Colby's already
overdeveloped Christian conscience. Though he strenuously denied that his
daughter had opposed Phoenix, perhaps Colby did want to atone for his part
in the program. It is also clear that he disapproved of certain of the
CIA's activities that he called "deplorable" and "wrong" and wanted them
stopped. In any case, he realized that a display of flexibility in his
dealings with Congress would increase the agency's chances of survival.

With CIA morale at a low ebb, Colby's enemies
began to line up. On the Left, a coalition of muckraking journalists, Vietnam
War critics, and ambitious legislators refused to give him credit for attempting
to open up the agency. On the Right, conservatives such as Barry Goldwater
disliked Colby's liberalism and concessions to the Church committee. Colby
had become politically vulnerable, and on 30 January 1976 President Gerald
Ford replaced him with George H. W. Bush. Colby had introduced some significant
reforms, such as the prohibition of assassination as an instrument of national
policy and the practice of informing select members of Congress about the
CIA's activities, but his intelligence career was over.

Colby's life continued to be eventful. In 1978
he published his memoir, Honorable Men, in which he defended himself against
the Left over Phoenix and against the Right over his decision to clear
the air while director of the CIA. In 1982, following the enactment of
stringent secrecy legislation in the administration of President Ronald
Reagan, the U.S. government began proceedings against Colby for making
unauthorized disclosures, in the French-language edition of his memoir,
about American efforts to retrieve secret codes from a sunken Soviet submarine.
His agreement to pay a $10,000 fine in an out-of-court settlement barely
covered the cracks between Colby and his enemies on the Right.

In 1984 Colby divorced his first wife and married
a former diplomat, Sally Shelton. He had resumed legal practice and lectured
widely, taking up a new cause--the campaign for a freeze on nuclear arms.
On a spring day in 1996, Colby went down to the waterfront near his weekend
home in Rock Point, Maryland, and launched his canoe into a stiff breeze.
Until his body was found several days later with no evident signs of foul
play, the press had one more chance to speculate about the fate of a man
whose manner of death seemed to conjure up the enigma of his life.
May 14, 1996

The remains
of former CIA Director William Colby were buried with military honors Monday
at Arlington National Cemetery. After a private service for family and
friends, an urn bearing Colby's ashes was transported by horse-drawn caisson
to its final resting place in a clearing surrounded by maple and pine trees.

Army marksmen fired a 21-gun salute, and a
bugler played taps as a flag was presented to Colby's wife, Sally Shelton-Colby.
Colby, 76, disappeared April 27 while canoeing near his Rock Point, Maryland.,vacation
home. His body was recovered eight days later.
Autopsy finds Colby likely collapsed before falling out
of canoe: May 11, 1996

Former CIA director William Colby died from
drowning and hypothermia after apparently collapsing from a heart attack
or stroke and falling out of his canoe, the state's medical examiner said
Friday.

Colby's body was found Monday after an eight-day
search that included helicopters, divers, dogs and sonar equipment. Colby,
who disappeared April 27 while canoeing near his waterfront home in southern
Maryland, was found lying facedown in a marshy riverbank.

An autopsy found that Colby, 76, had suffered
from hardening of the arteries, Chief Medical Examiner John Smialek said
in a statement.

The death was ruled accidental, rather than
from natural causes, because even though there was evidence Colby was ill
before falling out of the canoe, in the final analysis it was the drowning
and hypothermia that killed him, said Jeannette A. Duerr, a spokeswoman
for the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Hypothermia is
a dangerous drop in body temperature.

No blood clots were found, although they could
have dissolved during the week-long search for his body, the medical examiner
said.

The autopsy also showed that Colby had died
a short time after eating, and that he had a blood-alcohol level of 0.07
percent due to having wine with dinner. No drugs were found in his system,
the medical examiner said.

Colby capped a long career in intelligence
by serving as CIA chief from 1973 to 1976 in the Nixon and Ford administrations.

A private funeral service was to be held Monday
at Arlington National Cemetery where he will be buried with full military
honors. A public memorial service is scheduled for Tuesday at Washington
National Cathedral.
From a contemporary
press report:

May 5, 1996

Former CIA
director William E. Colby wasn't the sort of fellow who liked to be addressed
as "Mr. Colby."

"Call me
Bill, please," he asked in his affable way.

In his last
media interview April 23, four days before he collapsed and drowned while
canoeing near his southern Maryland weekend retreat, the ex-spy chief appeared
more youthful and vibrant than you might imagine a 76 year-old should look
like who began his long intelligence career as a commando parachuting behind
Nazi lines with the Office of Strategic Services in WWII. Nor
did Colby seem beaten up by his extensive experiences in both the Vietnam
War and the Cold War, two terribly different yet impossibly intertwined
American conflicts.

"I've been
lucky," Colby said, smiling modestly, insufficiently summing up on the
streets of Washington his life and CIA career. It was appropriate to chat
with the retired spymaster over a cup of espresso at a sidewalk cafe near
The White House; Colby would insist on paying, of course.

Besides
his tenure as director of central intelligence in the early seventies,
Colby may be best known as the head of the CIA's Far East Division during
the hottest period of the war in Vietnam.

For nearly
15 years, starting in the late fifties, Colby ran the CIA's covert operations
in Southeast Asia, including the notorious Phoenix Program, designed to
ferret out the Communists' political infrastructure in South Vietnam. In
later congressional testimony, Colby admitted the program had assassinated
over 20,000 of these suspected agents.

"I've defended
[Phoenix] as a necessary element of the war," Colby said. "The communists,
curiously enough, say it was the most effective program ever used against
them... The Phoenix, I always thought, was not all that effective. But
if you have a secret mafia inside your population you better find out who
they are, and that was what Phoenix was all about, to identify who they
were. And if so, [they should] either be captured, convinced to surrender,
or in a fight, shot. It was a war."

In seeming
contradiction to the bloody and corrupt tactics of that assassination spree,
there is evidence to support the notion that Colby wanted to help the Vietnamese
people. He supported the broader Pacification Program, which encouraged
and helped villagers to protect their hamlets rather than live as refugees
and see their homes destroyed by Viet Cong attacks — or American bulldozers.

"We would
take people out of the refugee camps and put them back in their old villages,
put some protection around them, give them some guns to protect themselves,
begin to rebuild the village, or the bridge, or the irrigation ditch or
whatever was necessary, and they would start up their lives; really decent
lives. That was the strategy [of the Pacification Program]," Colby said.

After leaving
the Republic of Vietnam and the battles that ultimately consumed the small
nation, Colby continued to ascend the ranks of the CIA. The well-known
architect of many of the Agency's dirtiest tricks became more and more
open about them. When appointed director, he revealed so much to Congress
that some of his colleagues whispered that Colby must be a KGB asset. President
Gerald Ford soon dismissed him from the job after only two years, in order
to appease the critics.

Of the nagging
conspiracy theories suggesting CIA involvement in President John F. Kennedy's
assassination — Colby was in Vietnam in November 1963 — the former director
said: "Oliver Stone came to see me once to get the material released that
the CIA had, and I said I believed in releasing it, maybe save the names
of a couple of agents.

"Believe
me, if the CIA had anything to do with the murder of our president I would
have discovered it in the early seventies and I would have revealed it
— I revealed a lot of other things."

Bill Colby
was the perfect product of an age where honor meant honesty, and a
bone-crushing handshake meant more than just a simple greeting. It explained
character.

Arguably,
however, Cold War super-spies such as Colby helped to perpetuate the pop
culture cliches which molded entertainment icons such as James Bond and
Mission Impossible in the movies and on TV, and this in turn shaped how
we think of the trenchcoat life. The champagne socializing, slicked-back
hair and natty dress (intentionally a little plain in the case of Colby)
all were perceived attributes of the high-profile Intel-operatives of his
era.

And so,
to some it was no surprise that the normally low-key Colby recently consulted
on a project in which he also starred — a CD-ROM adventure game called
Spycraft.

Colby said
the game's plot was realistic and proved the need for good intelligence
in the post-Cold War era.

"The premise
[of the game] is, you are a CIA officer and you're told a Russian presidential
candidate has just been assassinated," Colby explained. "The President
of the United States is next on the hit parade."

A realistic
scenario in 1996? American presidents have been assassinated before, Colby
pointed out. "It could happen tomorrow."

For Spycraft,
Colby teamed up with Major General Oleg Kalugin, the former chief of KGB
foreign counter-intelligence, who now lives in Washington. Both men
portray themselves in the game, and each help the player in solving the
mystery.

Greeting
Kalugin at my office after the interview, Colby invited the Russian to
"visit my dacha on the river. It's almost warm enough." It was from this
dacha on Maryland's Wicomico River that Colby ate his last meal.

Regarding
his conciliatory attitude toward a former Cold War adversary, Colby said:
"We fought the British; we fought the Spanish; we fought the Germans; we
fought the Japanese. Now they're our best allies. I'd like to see that
kind of relationship develop with the Russians in the years ahead."

As I sat
down with Kalugin, Colby wished everyone well and left. Moments later,
I realized I had forgotten to ask him to autograph a copy of Spycraft and
ran down a flight of stairs to intercept him. I ran out onto the streets
again and looked for him up and down the empty blocks. But, true to his
nature, the old spy had simply vanished into the day.
William Egan ColbyTENURE
AS DIRECTOR4 September
1973-30 January 1976BIRTH 4
January 1920, St. Paul, MinnesotaEDUCATIONPrinceton
University, B.A., 1940;Columbia
University, LL.B., 1947APPOINTED
10 May 1973 by President Richard M. Nixon; confirmed by Senate, 1
August 1973; sworn in, 4 September 1973 DEPUTY
DIRECTORLt. Gen.
Vernon A. Walters, US ArmyEARLIER
CAREERVolunteered
for active duty as 2nd Lieutenant, US Army, August 1941Served
with Office of Strategic Services, 1943-45Attorney
in private practice, New York, 1947-49; with National Labor Relations Board,
Washington, DC, 1949-50Various
posts in CIAChief,
Far East Division,Directorate
of Plans, CIA, 1962-67On leave
from CIA, assigned to Agency for International Development as Director
of Civil Operations and Rural Development Support, Saigon (with rank of
ambassador), 1968-71Executive
Director-Comptroller, 1972-73 Deputy
Director for Operations, 2 March-24 August 1973 (served concurrently as
Executive Secretary, CIA Management Committee)

LATER CAREERPrivate
law practice, consultant, and authorDied 27
April 1996

Remembered
as one of the last great "gentleman spies," Colby served as CIA director
from 1973 to 1976. During Colby's tenure, the agency supported opponents
of Chilean President Salvador Allende, a Marxist, who was killed
during a 1973 military coup. While CIA station chief in Vietnam during
the 1960s, Colby had directed Operation Phoenix, pooling U.S. intelligence
resources to identify and "neutralize" Viet Cong leaders, ultimately resulting
in as many as 20,000 deaths.

Colby is
perhaps best known for telling Congress about the CIA "family jewels"
-- detailed accounts of extensive covert operations that in 1975 prompted
Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) to compare the agency to "a rogue elephant
on the rampage." After leaving the CIA, Colby practiced law at Reid &
Priest in Washington, D.C., and later at Donovan, Leisure, Newton &
Irvine in Los Angeles. He also had a consulting business andspoke on the
lecture circuit. In 1994 Colby signed on with Activision, an entertainment
and video game publisher, to develop spy thriller video games.

Riebling
counts Colby as a suspect because one of his given roles while
working for Helms at the CIA was to protect the agency's image and thus
to prevent it from being tarnished by the Nixon administration's troubles.
According to Riebling, Woodward first met with Deep Throat within hours
of Colby's damage-control assignment, and Colby was also "rumored to use
underground parking structures for secret meetings."

Colby
became the subject of a different mystery in April 1996 when he disappeared
while canoeing on the Potomac River. He was missing for nine days before
his body was found in a tributary. An autopsy revealed that Colby, age
76, had possibly suffered a stroke or heart attack before falling into
the water and drowning.

The
prospects that William E. Colby was Deep Throat dim considerably in light
of Woodward's assertion that he would reveal Deep Throat's identity upon
his death. Colby's widow, Sally Shelton-Colby, a top official at the U.S.
Agency for International Development, characterized the idea of her husband
as the secret Watergate source as "preposterous." "My husband wasn't
Deep Throat," she said. "Bill just didn't have it in him."
Updated:
5 March 2000 Updated: 22 December 2001 Updated: 22 February 2003 Updated:
14 June 2003 Updated: 8 November 2005